GeIL (that's capital 'I' capital 'L') is going Hollywood with its naming scheme for a new technology the company claims will result in higher quality memory shipping from the factory. Called Die-hard Burn-in Technology (DBT), GeIL says the new system will virtually eliminate early failure among memory modules and catch defects that otherwise would have went unnoticed.

This begs the question, don't memory manufacturers already test for defects to avoid this scenario? Yes, and here's what GeIL has to say on the matter:

"The conventional way of memory module burn-in is done by regular market-available motherboards with limited module accommodation and burn-in time of approximately 20 minutes under room temperature. Not to mention that each of the motherboard-based burn-in platform requires manpowered monitoring." - GeIL

DBT Explained

Using a custom-made burn-in chamber, which the company calls DBT-1, GeIL claims it can test up to 1,000 modules all at once. Instead of using traditional motherboards, the DIMMs are placed onto specially designed chipsets outfitted with GeIL's custom coded burn-in testing software. Temperatures are then ramped up to 100 degrees Celcius where the modules sit and roast for up to 24 hours, a process GeIL says ages the RAM to the equivalent of three months of normal usage, or just beyond the time that most early failures are likely to occur.

What about Availability?

According to the press release, all GeIL products will eventually be subjected to the rigorous DBT burn-in, but not right way. Kicking off the new technology will be select DDR-2 kits, with notebook SO-DIMMs and other memory soon to follow. All products certified with the DBT process will carry a special logo, seen below.

Comment

"Temperatures are then ramped up to 100 degrees Celcius where the
modules sit and roast for up to 24 hours, a process GeIL says ages the
RAM to the equivalent of three months of normal usage"

At the risk of overextending analogies, but I have my concern about this being roughly equivalent to beating old furniture with a baseball bat and calling it antique because it shows similar wear... Huge stress over a short period != Reduced yet constant stress over a more prolonged period.

I mean, if this works, then awesome... But I've never even heard of these guys before. Wouldn't someone like Patriot, Corsair, etc. have thought to do this first? They'd want reduced hardware failure on the consumer side as much as anyone else.

I'm just a bit leery of any suggestion that one can realistically simulate 90-ish days in the span of 1.